Page 245 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

234 McLEOD, KOSICKI, McLEOD

distinguished between episodic and thematic framing of news stories.
Episodic framing uses case-study or event-oriented reports and concrete
instances; thematic forms place the issue in a more general or abstract
context. Although content analyses showed that few television news sto-
ries were exclusively one or the other, nearly 80% of a sample of CBS
news stories were predominantly episodic.
Experimental variation of the two types of story frames showed that
whereas thematic stories increased the attributions of responsibility to
government and society, episodic treatments decreased system-level
responsibility overall (Iyengar, 1991). The strength of framing effects var-
ied across the five issues used. The consequences of episodic versus the-
matic framing have substantial implications for subsequent political
behavior. Iyengar found that people who attribute the cause of a problem
to systemic forces are more likely to bring that problem into their political
judgments than are people citing dispositional causes.
The 30-year trend of increasing dominance of television as the pri-
mary news medium may have stimulated a concomitant trend toward
nonsystemic attribution. Political stories in the print media are more
likely to be thematic than those of television news, and print media use
may enhance systemic attribution. McLeod, Sun, Chi and Pan (1990), in a
survey of public reactions to the “war on drugs,” found responses to
open-ended questions about causes of the problem formed three distinct
attributional dimensions, each having a dispositional (individual-family,
interpersonal, drug supplier) and a systemic (foreign nations, economic
conditions, social-legal) end. Frequent and attentive newspaper readers
were more likely to invoke systemic causes and responsibilities on two
of the three dimensions. Television news use was unrelated to any
dimension.
A somewhat different pattern of attributional effects was shown in a
1972–1974 panel study during the Watergate era (McLeod, Brown, Becker,
& Ziemke, 1977). During an interval when trust in government declined
markedly, the most avid users of both newspaper and television news
held relatively stable levels of trust. When rating different sources as to
blame for Watergate, they tended to blame Nixon more and the political
system less than did other respondents, even after partisanship was con-
trolled. This may have been the result of the statements appearing fre-
quently in the news of that period that “the system works.” Singling out
the “bad apple in the barrel” may be easier than considering the more fun-
damental problems of system storage. Recent work by Sotirovic (2001b)
ties individualistic explanations for crime and welfare dependency to
media and active processing of political information. Active processing of
national television public affairs content increases likelihood of individu-